September 22, 2009

News of the Dead: This Just In—Soldiers Die in U.S. Civil War

Deaths come in pairs, and sometimes it seems that News of
the Dead does, too. In the past week there have been two stories
about the remains of Civil War soldiers in this area.

First there was the ceremonial burial of the remains of a
New York soldier who died at Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862—the bloodiest day of the
war, with over 23,000 killed). A tourist at the battlefield found some bone
fragments, uniform buttons, a belt buckle, and scraps of fabric about a year
ago; the buttons identified the remains as being that of a soldier from one of
the 24 New York regiments that fought that day. Government Scientists and
Experts had a go and decided the soldier was between 17 and 19 years old when
he died. That was about as much as they could figure out, so the bits and bones
were put into a box inside a “period-appropriate” pine coffin and sent to the
National Cemetery near Schuylerville. Civil War re-enactors stood guard over
the coffin until it was buried last week on the 147th anniversary of
the battle. The grave marker says it’s an unknown soldier who died at Antietam.
“We’re going to remember him as a hero,” says Donald E. Roy, the director of
New York’s Military Forces Honor Guard (and a civilian)—although, of course, no
one knows who the soldier was or what he really did.

Next was the story of John F. Wescott Jr., who was fooling
around with findagrave.com and discovered that his great,
great, great grandpa, Capt. Andrew W. Davis of the 8th Infantry Regiment
of New Jersey, was buried in an unmarked grave in Newark. Last Saturday the
Wescotts got together and installed a marker from the Veterans Administration
over the Captain, who died from the wound he got when he was shot in the leg at
Gettysburg.

These two dead Civil War soldiers caught my attention
because at the time I was reading This
Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin
Faust. Of course I was aware that the Civil War changed the way death was
regarded in the U.S.—it furthered the development and use of embalming, for one
thing. But Faust’s book explains how far-reaching the changes were. The
slaughter brought about the Federal Government’s first foray into arranging its
citizens’ personal lives, caused people to reject their religious beliefs, and
resulted in both widespread sentimentality and cynicism. It launched a
tentative move towards women’s rights, created big advances in the field of
statistics, and made James Russell Lowell write bad poetry (and lots of people
write atrocious songs). It caused people to fret about identifying and
returning the remains of their dead—just like the box of bone bits in New York
and the Captain’s grave in New Jersey. It’s a terrific book, well-researched
and well-written, and I recommend it to you.

Comments

Slightly wrong-o there buddy! Only 3654 killed at Antietam. Just under 23,000 casualties, which includes captured, missing (i.e. ran away), and wounded. That is quite a difference!! Still the bloodiest day...